Ulrik

by Steven E Wedel

  “I’d like a glass of ice water,” she said.

  “Then we’ll go to the kitchen,” Chris said. “Through there.” He pointed toward a short hallway, then followed the two Indians into the room. He watched Kiona take two glasses from a cabinet, ice from the freezer and water from the tap. She kept one and handed the other to her friend. “Sit down,” Chris offered, nodding at the chairs around the table.

  “Yes, I kidnapped Joey,” Kiona said as they sat. “He’s a wonderful boy. I’ve always wanted a son. I promise you I cared for him just like he was my own. But …”

  “But what?”

  “Well, Ulrik has plans for him. He thinks Joey will grow up to be a great leader among werewolves, leading us all on some fantastic war so that we can live openly as the dominant species,” she said. “It’s all a bit much for such a little boy.”

  “What’s he doing to Joey?”

  “Teaching him how to be a werewolf,” Kiona said. “How to change shape. How to hunt. How to kill.”

  Chris sighed and lowered his head for a moment. Nervousness about the natures of his visitors brought him back to the moment. “Why? Why would he do that? Why would you take Joey to him?”

  “I didn’t know what he planned,” Kiona said, sipping her water. “Not until it was too late. Then Shara got there with … well, you don’t want to know that.”

  “With what?”

  “Not what. Who,” Kiona said.

  “Fine. Who?” Chris demanded.

  “His name is Thomas McGrath,” she said. “They seemed to be quite close friends. Very familiar.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “I guessed you didn’t know. They’ve been meeting for years. I remember seeing them together the first time about three years ago. Before Joey started school. They went to lunch together. Joey was with them.”

  “No. I don’t believe that.”

  “She speaks the truth,” John Redleaf said, breaking his silence.

  “But … She couldn’t have had an affair.”

  “I’m just telling you what I saw,” Kiona said. “I think you were at one of your art conventions, in Chicago, that day I saw them meet for lunch. At Ulrik’s house, they arrived together, took a room in his house like a couple.” She shrugged. “He’s a werewolf. A pretty old one. Maybe she just needed that wildness back in her life.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Chris said.

  “Joey is having a hard time with it, too.”

  “Joey.” Chris pressed his forehead into his empty palm. “My Joey.”

  “He asked about you. Shara wouldn’t tell him anything. He kept asking if you were coming to be with him.”

  “Where?” Chris asked, looking up again. “Where are they?”

  “Mexico.”

  “Where in Mexico?”

  “We can take you there,” Kiona said. “With some conditions.”

  “What conditions?”

  “First, you let me train Joey,” Kiona said. “He must know how to use his Gift.”

  “No. He has to take his serum. I don’t know what Shara was doing, why he became a wolf, but I won’t have it. He’s my son. He’s human.”

  John Redleaf said, “He’s not human. He is your son. You must accept that he has embraced the wolf.”

  “No. He wouldn’t do that,” Chris argued. “Joey is a good kid. He wouldn’t want to become an animal.”

  “Tell that to his little playmate from school,” Kiona said.

  “Jenny.” Chris closed his eyes for a moment, remembering the girl laying on an old mattress in the basement of a Utah house. I left her to die. “What other conditions?” he asked.

  “Ulrik will not give the boy up easily,” John said.

  “No,” Kiona agreed. “We’ll have to take him. When we do, we’ll need more protection than your cameras, fences and guns.”

  “What are you talking about?” Chris asked, his heart sinking.

  “Numbers,” Kiona said. “Allies.”

  Chris shook his head. “Fenris?”

  Kiona nodded. “He is the only one Ulrik fears. Except maybe John Redleaf here.”

  “Why?”

  “Fenris is strong, physically, but he is powerful in other ways. He has as much knowledge about the Pack as Ulrik. But he’s been more liberal with the Gift than Ulrik. Fenris has many werewolves at his command,” Kiona said. “He will protect us.”

  “No,” Chris said. “He wants Joey dead. He thinks Joey is supposed to fulfill that prophecy. The one about the culls.”

  “No one knows what the prophecy means,” Kiona said. “No one.”

  “Ulrik …?”

  “No.” Kiona shook her head, leaning forward across the table. “Some have ideas. It is said the Pack will gather under this Alpha and come to rule humans. Others say … other things. If we go to Fenris with Joey, he will take us in because he’ll think the prophecy is working in his favor.”

  “This is crazy. Superstitious craziness,” Chris said. “Prophecies. You people believe in them?”

  “It wasn’t so long ago you didn’t believe in werewolves,” Kiona said. She lifted her hand, drawing Chris’s eyes to it as she let the hand and forearm change into the clawed hand and arm of the wolf-woman. “It’s easier to believe in prophecies when you are a creature of legend,” she said.

  Chris thought about it for a moment. “You want to get Joey and go to Fenris. What do you need me for?”

  “You’re his father,” Kiona said.

  “You didn’t bother to ask me to come along the first time you kidnapped him.”

  “This time is different. He may not want to come. He loves me,” Kiona said. “I feel sure about that. But he – ”

  “He loves you?” Chris asked. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I was with him during his first transformation. I was kind to him when Ulrik was harsh. I comforted him until …”

  “Until what?”

  “Until your wife arrived with her new lover.”

  “Ulrik sent you away because Shara’s there?”

  “That’s part of it,” Kiona said. “Ulrik is not one to share authority. He believes his method of training is the only way.”

  “Is he … is he mean to Joey?”

  “He drives the boy. He wakes him early to practice shapeshifting and hunting. He demands obedience and perfection.”

  “Shara always said he was a patient teacher.”

  “That was before he realized Shara is …” Kiona hesitated, as if it physically hurt her to finish the sentence. “Before he knew she was the Mother. Before he was training the Alpha.”

  “What’s Shara doing about it? She’s just letting Ulrik do this?”

  “She never left the room she shares with McGrath,” Kiona said. “She leaves Joey completely in Ulrik’s care.”

  “So much of this doesn’t seem right,” Chris said. “Shara having an affair, leaving Joey for Ulrik to take care of. The idea of going back to Fenris to ask for protection … It just doesn’t seem right. And I still don’t see why you need me.”

  “Joey will be glad to see you,” Kiona argued. “He’ll have to choose between you and me, or Ulrik, Shara and McGrath. I think he will choose those who have shown him the most love.”

  Chris placed the gun on the table. He believed now the two Indians meant him no harm. They believed they needed him. He covered his eyes to hide his tears as he thought of his son running to him after his monthly injections. Shara always gave them to him alone, usually going to Joey’s room and locking the door. Chris would stand outside, listening as Joey argued, then cried as Shara held him still and pushed the needle into his tiny arm. Shara insisted on doing it alone, saying she felt guilty, that Joey suffered the curse because of her weakness and so Chris shouldn’t be in on forcing the injection; instead, he would be the good guy who got to comfort Joey afterward.

  She loves him. I know she does. I don’t know about this McGrath. I don’t know. But these people know where my wife and son are.
They know how to take me there.

  “You said Shara thinks I’m dead,” he said. “How did you know to come here?”

  “Fenris is no fool,” Kiona said. “Alive, you have some value to him. I never believed he killed you.”

  “I escaped.”

  Kiona snorted. “I would bet my life you were allowed to escape in hopes you would be able to lead Fenris to Shara and Joey. I’m sure you’re being watched right now by Fenris’s people.”

  Chris lowered his gaze to the surface of the table. I’ve been a fool.

  “Do you have a plan?” he asked.

  Shara

  “No, Joey, you have to carry the one,” Shara said. “Nine plus four is thirteen. You put the three here and carry the one up here above the five. See? Then add the one to the five, then add that to the six.”

  “That’s twelve. Do I put all the twelve here?” Joey asked.

  “No, you have to carry that one, too,” Shara said. “It’s too bad we don’t have somebody here who once pretended to be a teacher so he could help you with this.”

  Ulrik, his back to the mother and son, smiled but pretended he hadn’t heard them. He fanned himself with a paper fan featuring an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on its face. His gaze was on Thomas McGrath, watching as the man sat cross-legged in the yard, eyes closed, hands resting palm-up in his lap as he meditated.

  Shara and a McGrath.

  He still found it hard to believe. Somewhere, Ulrik was sure Thomas’s cousin Luther was grinning in his grave. Most of Luther’s clan had been hunted down and destroyed following that business in Oklahoma in 1917.

  Katherine Cross. Is it true she almost bore a child to term?

  Only three people knew for sure. Katherine was allowed to die after the child was taken from her womb. Thomas McGrath killed the doctor after haunting him for several years following Katherine’s death. The schoolteacher … Ulrik grinned. Thomas had bitten the schoolteacher, afflicting him with the “curse” he’d helped the doctor try to eradicate. Ulrik appreciated the ironic justice of that.

  Nasty business.

  Thomas McGrath separated himself from Luther’s clan after Katherine’s death. Luther moved north, to Nebraska, and once again began luring young girls to his bonfires, drugging and raping them in hopes of finding one who could bear a werewolf baby to term.

  I would have put a stop to that long before, if only I had known.

  There had been very few shapeshifters in America at the time. Most who had come over from the Old World were busy trying to make a life for themselves and not interested in hunting down those endangering the Pack in some faraway inland state.

  More irony. As more werewolves immigrated to America, Ulrik had left the country, going to Siberia in search of adventure as a wolf.

  Kiona drove me to it.

  That wasn’t fair, he reminded himself. He spent nearly two decades with her, believing she was the one destined to be the Mother. She matured into a fine-looking woman. When she was about sixteen she had first come to Ulrik’s bed as a woman. They were together regularly after that, but she never became pregnant. She did, however, become bitter and angry. Eventually, blaming Ulrik for her barren womb, she left him alone.

  He went to the Yukon and mined gold for a time after that, then crossed the Bering Strait to Asia and, as a wolf, worked his way into Siberia. The cold agreed with him. And, he had to admit, he was glad to be away from Kiona, from Tony Weismann, from the land of Elysia, Daniel, Beauty, and all the other faces from his past. He stayed in Siberia and Russia for a long time, completely unaware that a world war was raging across Europe until he came to Germany and slowly assimilated himself to living with humans again in 1935.

  Katherine Cross was long since dead by then. Luther had moved north. Not that I knew any of it.

  He had not learned of Katherine Cross until the closing days of the Second World War. It was rumors of her death that had brought him back to America. He spent ten years hunting down known members of the McGrath clan, taking what information he could from them before killing them.

  Luther had eluded Ulrik and the two or three other werewolves hunting him until the late 1980s. Ulrik found him stalking the Dallas area, followed him to a party in a luxurious mansion and caught him with a woman in one of the bedrooms. The fight was short and much less dramatic than Ulrik had anticipated. When he left the room, Luther McGrath’s head was separated from his body and the woman he’d wounded had chosen death rather than become a werewolf.

  Ulrik looked at his hands and thought for a moment about the blood he’d spilled over his long life.

  There is more blood yet to be spilled.

  His eyes returned to Thomas and Ulrik wondered if the man found inner peace through his meditation. He knew Thomas carried a great deal of guilt over the death of the Cross girl. Since her death he had withdrawn, not associating with other members of the Pack unless absolutely necessary. Ulrik remembered when Kiona had called him three years ago to say that Thomas had confronted Shara in a grocery store, then had lunch with her. It had been a surprising turn of events and he’d wondered often what the man had told her and what she’d done about it.

  Not enough.

  No, not enough to protect herself from those who were watching her night and day. And now here she was in Mexico, her husband gone and a McGrath sharing her bed.

  “Good job, Joey,” Shara said. “You got all five of these right, with just a little help. You can go play now.”

  Ulrik heard the boy get up and run into the house. Behind him, Shara sighed and gathered up papers. Inside the house, the television came on, then the Mexican program was overridden by the sounds of electronic gunfire as Joey plugged in his favorite Nintendo game. Shara came to sit in a chair beside Ulrik, Joey’s math homework in her hands.

  “It is good that you make him continue his school lessons,” Ulrik said.

  “There’s more to life than being able to change into a wolf and hunt rabbits,” she answered.

  Ulrik smiled and nodded. He motioned toward Thomas with his fan, saying, “You have seen that Joey looks at him with suspicion. He will gain some understanding of your relationship soon. He will not like that Thomas has replaced his father in your life.”

  “I know,” Shara said.

  “You have not told Joey about his father.”

  Shara shook her head. “I – I can’t make myself do it.”

  They sat quietly for a moment. Ulrik knew Shara was watching Thomas in the yard. He wondered what she was thinking.

  “I look back at what I was the first time I saw you and I can’t believe all the stuff that’s happened to me since then,” she said. “Two dead husbands. Babies fathered by a wolf. Two years living as a wolf, killing anything and everything. Even people. Now here I am in Mexico, letting you teach my son to become some kind of werewolf leader.”

  “The tapestry of your life certainly is a colorful one,” Ulrik said.

  Shara snorted, then changed the subject. “You’ve been watching Thomas. Are you mad at me for bringing him?”

  “No.” Ulrik shook his head. “You needed him. He loves you and has protected you. That, my cub, makes him a friend to me. I was perhaps more wary because of the friend Kiona brought with her when she arrived here with Joey. And because I killed Thomas’s cousin not long after I rescued you from your two years as a wolf.”

  “He told me about that. He said his cousin had it coming.”

  Ulrik sighed. “We all do.”

  “Yes,” Shara agreed. She was quiet for a moment, then said, “You don’t have much security here. Isn’t this supposed to be some kind of fortress?”

  “There is enough.”

  “What? The woods with a few werewolves wandering around in them?”

  Ulrik turned his full attention to her. “It is enough. There are two dozen of my most trusted friends wandering in the woods, as you say. Also, the village of Las Sombras is in my debt.”

  “So Thomas was right about that
,” Shara said.

  “He is a smart man. Yes, for almost one hundred years I have provided for the villagers. In exchange they act as guardians of my house here.”

  “Still, there are no fences, no cameras. What if someone gets through the woods undetected? They’ll have easy access to the house. I haven’t even seen an alarm system in the house.”

  “You have built fences armed with cameras and yet you lost your son,” Ulrik said.

  “He went out. No one came in.”

  “Tony Weismann breached your security measures easily enough.”

  “We learned from that and took precautions,” Shara argued.

  “The attack I am expecting here will not be stealthy, Shara. If it comes. Fenris will attack as a wolf, with others in wolf form. However, I do not intend to wait for that. When the time is right, we will take the battle to Fenris.”

  “You don’t know that’s how it will happen,” Shara said. “You of all people should know better than to underestimate an enemy.”

  “Fenris has been my enemy since before your parents were born, Shara. I do not underestimate him. He is a cruel man. A cruel wolf. He is arrogant, and that will be his mistake.”

  “Tony Weisman was arrogant, and he nearly killed me and Joey,” Shara replied. “Didn’t Fenris, or his cronies, already kill some little girl while you were right there with her? Kiona’s already turned against you and killed – ”

  “Enough!” Ulrik put his fan down and rose from his chair. “It is a good day for an afternoon nap,” he said, then went into the house. He made it a point to pass through the living room, where Joey didn’t even look away from his game as Ulrik passed him.

  In his room, Ulrik sat at his desk, toying with a pen as he stared out the window. Shara may be right. And, she will have more questions soon. Questions I cannot answer.

  Fenris

  Somehow, Fenris knew Vincent Oldham was going to be on the other end of the ringing telephone. He studied the receiver for a moment before snatching it from its cradle. He held it to his ear without speaking, waiting. He was sure he heard the howl of a wolf in the background.